Boston study links outreach, Jewish choices
By Sue Fishkoff
SAN FRANCISCO (JTA)-The majority of children in interfaith households in Boston - almost 60 percent, far above the national average -- are being raised as Jews.
That's one of the key findings of the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study, commissioned by the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the central planning and fund-raising arm of Boston's Jewish community, and carried out by Brandeis University's Steinhardt Social Research Institute.
Researchers interviewed 400 Jewish households by phone and an additional 1,400 individuals from a list provided by Jewish organizations. The margin of error differed by question.
Some local Jewish leaders say a key factor is the community's heavy investment in outreach programming -- $321,000 this year, almost 1.5 percent of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies' $27 million campaign.
Those funds are given to programs aimed at interfaith families and individuals considering conversion run
by the Jewish Community Center, Jewish Family Services, the Reform and Conservative movements and other agencies.
The study's preliminary findings, announced last Friday, show strong growth of the Jewish community, which now stands at 265,500, or 9 percent of the total population. That figure includes 57,000 non-Jews living in Jewish households; indeed, the study found that half of area Jewish households involve an intermarriage.
The number of non-Jewish adults in Jewish households has risen from 25,000 to 42,500 since 1995, the study found.
As increasing numbers of those interfaith families identify with the Jewish community, more and more are raising their children Jewish. Institute director Leonard Saxe, the primary investigator on the study, called the 60 percent figure "exceptional."
In comparison, the National Jewish Population Study 2000-2001 reported that between 33 percent and 39
percent of children in interfaith households were being raised as Jews. The 2002 Jewish Community Study of New York put the figure at 30 percent in the New York area.
"When we first saw the 60 percent number, we said, 'that can't be true,' " said Gil Preuss, vice president for strategy and planning at Combined Jewish Philanthropies. But it made sense when he considered other figures: Some 37 percent of local intermarried families are members of synagogues, and more than 70 percent of the children who are being raised Jewish in intermarried families are receiving formal Jewish education.
The Boston study also reveals that 90 percent of local Jews "are connected in some way, even if it's just giving money" to Jewish organizations, Preuss continued.
All of this suggests a Jewish community that is vibrant and growing, in contrast to previous surveys that showed a drop-off in Jewish populations in the Northeast.
Saxe and Combined Jewish Philanthropies officials are loathe to draw direct links between increased Jewish affiliation among the intermarried and increased communal investment in outreach programming, but other Jewish leaders are less hesitant.
"CJP is the only federation that has made a serious commitment for over 10 years to fund this," said Paula Brody, outreach director of the Northeast Council of the Union for Reform Judaism, whose organization receives $140,000 a year from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies for a wide variety of adult-education seminars and workshops aimed at interfaith couples and individuals considering conversion. "We offered these programs before the CJP funding, but it has enabled us to expand our offerings and advertise them in the secular press, so we can reach the unaffiliated."
Preuss says the Combined Jewish Philanthropies used a 1995 Jewish communal study to redraw its strategic plan to encourage local synagogues and Jewish agencies to be more open and welcoming to the unaffiliated, particularly the intermarried. They increased funding for adult Jewish education, mainly run through synagogues, from $3.6 million to $6.4 million.
"It's an activist approach" to building Jewish identity, "connecting people in diverse ways to Jewish life," Preuss said. "That's how we see our purpose, not just to collect and distribute money."
Brody says her Reform outreach programs reach 600 to 750 non-Jews or interfaith couples every year, a number she compares to "a medium-sized congregation of unaffiliated people stepping into the Jewish community every year for the past 10 years."
Saxe says his study in Boston could "change the debate about intermarriage." He noted gender differences:
The children are raised Jewish in virtually every intermarriage where the woman is Jewish, but the figure is much lower when the Jewish partner is the man.
That suggests that Boston's Jewish community should focus both on providing better Jewish education to non-Jewish mothers and on finding more effective ways to engage Jewish boys and young men in Jewish life, so
they don't "run from the bimah," or dais, after their bar mitzvahs, he said.
The findings also suggest that intermarriage, instead of having a negative effect on a given Jewish population, can lead to the reverse if more intermarried families affiliate with the Jewish community.
That's true in Boston, Brody noted, where most of the "Jewish population" increase since 1995 is made up of intermarried households.
"What's remarkable is that these families see themselves not as where the Jewish partner has married out but where the Christian partner has married in," she said.